CABLE and Wireless Communications (CWC), the UK's biggest and newest cable telephone and television group, is likely to float a 14.7% stake in London and New York on Monday.
The flotation, which is not big enough to propel the new group into the FTSE, has been expected since CWC was formed in 1996 by merging the Mercury unit of Cable and Wireless with the three British cable TV units of NYNEX Corporation and Bell Canada.
CWC confirmed after the market closed that more than 95% of the North American investors had accepted share offers in the new company.
A partial flotation was expected immediately after the offer closed. ''The management are pretty confident that dealings will begin on Monday,'' a company spokeswoman said.
She said a few details remained to be finalised and added CWC would confirm the start of trade on Monday.
Analysts, who are keen to see the market value the new company, expect CWC's shares to begin trading at 1.3pm on Monday to coincide with the opening in New York. After the merger, there will be only one brand name - Cable and Wireless -and a huge advertising campaign is planned to ensure the name wins public recognition.
CWC will provide a broad range of local, national and international voice and data services and, in some regions, multichannel TV and internet computer services.
Despite bringing together cable TV groups NYNEX CableComms, Bell Cablemedia and Videotron, CWC's core business will be the telephony provided by Mercury. It will be BT's main rival.
But with initially only 1.1 million residential telecom and 80,000 business customers, compared to BT's 20.5 million residential and seven million business clients, some analysts say the new company will only pose a serious threat to BT in the middle of the next century.
''I don't see CWC as a threat to BT in the short and medium term,'' said Oliver Ehrenberg, telecoms analyst at Robert Fleming.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article